Category - Must Reads

Recently, Laurie Segall, CNN Senior Technology Correspondent, interviewed several Silicon Valley technology industry residents with conservative &/or libertarian philosophies. This video captures their worries, from safety concerns to job termination. Many on this video would not speak without complete anonymity, due to the sure backlash they would receive at work.

Also, read a related article from Bloomberg. Note, this “witch hunt” extends beyond the technology industry in the San Francisco Bay Area, including Silicon Valley.

A new ad appealing to black voters has is set to hit the web less than twenty-four hours before Virginia elects its next Governor.

The ad, which accuses current Lieutenant Governor and Democrat Ralph Northam of “throwing Justin Fairfax under the bus” implores African-Americans to vote against Ralph Northam.

“Don’t be taken for granted and don’t get played,” the ad reads. “Send a message to Ralph Northam loud and clear. We won’t be thrown under the bus. We won’t stand for Northam because Northam didn’t stand for justice. Our votes matter.”

The PAC campaign is led by a group of black Republicans including former Congressman JC Watts, Star Parker (President of CURE), Dean Nelson, Elroy Sailor, Jennifer Carroll, and others.

Northam was criticized last month when his campaign dropped Fairfax, an African-American Democrat running for Lieutenant Governor alongside Northam and current Attorney General Mark Herring.

Northam’s opponent, former RNC Chairman of Virginia and Republican Ed Gillespie, has been gaining ground in recent polls.

The recent $50,000 ad campaign is sponsored by the North Star Leadership Fund and Frederick Douglass Foundation, and focuses on radio, digital ads, and pamphlets. The ad will be distributed on Election Day, and will focus on polling locations in Northern Virginia, Richmond, and the Tidewater water.

Democracy for America, a progressive group focused on getting Fairfax elected, withdrew its support of Northam’s campaign.

“Ralph Northam’s gutless, politically senseless, and morally debased decision yesterday to openly backtrack on his commitment to standing up for immigrant families is a picture-perfect example of why Democracy for America never endorsed him in the primary and focused the entirety of our efforts in Virginia on down-ticket races, like Justin Fairfax’s campaign for lieutenant governor. It’s also why, today, we’re announcing that we will no longer do any work to directly aid Northam’s gubernatorial efforts,” DFA executive director Charles Chamberlain said.

“Leadership starts at the top, and this is an example of poor leadership,” Schnatter added.

Papa John’s stock is reportedly down 8.5 percent as of yesterday. The company not only has a deal with the NFL, but 23 different teams comprising the league.

Schnatter, who is reportedly a Republican, has been in the news before. In 2012, he said escalating healthcare costs under Obamacare will contribute to the rise of pizza prizes. He also took flak for his defense of buying himself a 24,000-square-foot home.

“America in 2016 is on the path to becoming what Germany was in 1867,” Schnatter wrote in his new book, per Business Insider.

“If you believed the wrong thing, the government attacked you. If you became successful, the government took your money,” he said. “And if you dared go against the whims and will of society’s rulers, the government beheaded you.”

“You’ve got to have free markets with limited government, with the proper amount of regulation where you don’t jam entrepreneurship,” Schnatter continued.

It’ll be interesting to see how the company will be affected by this in the long-term.

Current Virginia Lieutenant Governor and Democrat nominee for Governor Ralph Northam is desperately fishing for votes, so his campaign is issuing one defamation attack after another to paint his opponent–Ed Gillespie–in the most egregious terms to win.

The latest attack, an ad issued by a pro-Northam SuperPAC called Latino Victory US, depicts a man in a truck adorned with a Confederate flag and Gillespie bumper sticker targeting kids of different ethnic backgrounds. You can find the ridiculous ad below:

“The ad, titled “American Nightmare,” shows a large pick-up truck with a Gillespie campaign sticker, a ‘Don’t Tread On Me’ front license plate, and a huge Confederate flag on the back, chasing down a group of minority children, including a Muslim girl wearing a hijab, an African-American boy, and two young Latinos.”

But these acts of desperation aren’t working on voters despite what Northam’s campaign is saying. They have even turned off the editors of major influential publications here in Virginia. For reference: Gillespie recently won the endorsements of the Winchester Star, Inside NoVA, and yes, Richmond Times-Dispatch.

However muddied the president’s statements on Charlottesville were, Gillespie provided a clear contrast by immediately condemning the August gathering:

“Having a right to spew vile hate does not make it right. It is painful to see these ugly events in Charlottesville last night and today. These displays have no place in our Commonwealth, and the mentality on display is rejected by the decent, thoughtful and compassionate fellow Virginians I see every day. I know we all appreciate the law enforcement officials maintaining order and protecting public safety there.”

All eyes are on the Commonwealth of Virginia these next few days as voters in our state prepare to elect a new governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general on Tuesday, November 7, 2017. As expected, this election cycle–Virginia boasts elections every year–was nasty. I cannot wait for the ads to disappear from local TV and radio markets here.

Virginia is a conservative state when you exclude hubs like the immediate DC-area suburbs, Richmond, and portions of Hampton Roads. If you watch election returns for every statewide election, you know Northern Virginia–particularly Fairfax and Arlington counties–decide the fate of elections here. The map is overwhelmingly red up until the final returns. (Many Virginians believe more of the vote shares in NoVA will go to Gillespie this year.) The folks here are mild-mannered, self-reliant, God-fearing, and cling to their guns. This is a Southern state, no matter how many entrenched government workers or rabid Democrat consultants keen on turning the state blue are. Virginia has been mired with a storied past, but is doing its best to move into a better future. I’m proud to call this state my adopted home for the last five years and hope others in disaffected blue states come here to make a new home.

I have no qualms voting for Gillespie and the rest of the ticket next Tuesday. I hope you join me in doing so to getting Virginia moving in a positive direction again.

White nationalist Richard Spencer may have a right to spew his venom under the First Amendment in the U.S., but that doesn’t every country or state will permit him to speak. Take Poland for instance. Spencer was invited to deliver a Polish Independence Day talk in that respective country (what the heck does he know about Polish independence?), but their Ministry of Foreign Affairs weighed in and announced their opposition to his visit there:

“Spencer’s views strike not only the Jewish community or other minority groups,” Agnieszka Markiewicz, director of the AJC Central European office, said in her call to Polish authorities, which was published in a Polish daily newspaper. “The hatred that Spencer and his followers proclaim is a threat to all who are close to the values of human rights and democracy.

“We call on the organizers to remove his name from the list of participants in the planned meeting, and the authorities to support this call.”

This is the same country, much like my ancestral homeland, that survived both Nazism and Soviet Communism. The Eastern Bloc doesn’t tolerate views like this–given their history. Let’s hope the Polish people teach this guy a lesson in history.

“Probably Republican,” he said. “Because I think there’s a place for somebody who is socially a centrist, but I’m very fiscally conservative, but I think there’s better ways now to make governments smaller.”

“Again using technology, government as a service can have a dramatic impact on how we live our lives,” he added. “If you don’t understand technology and you don’t understand the impact it has on jobs that technology is having and will continue to have, then you’re gonna run into some severe roadblocks.”

Modern communication is outdated. Centralized communication platforms built on private servers are only as secure as their weakest defense, user privacy is habitually violated as service providers sell behavioral data to advertisers, and content is restricted to a single platform.

The solution is the Mercury Protocol, an open-source project for communication platforms to utilize decentralized blockchain technology at minimal cost. Any communication platforms that integrate the Mercury Protocol will be able to exchange messages and content, increase user privacy through pseudonymity, leverage tokens to encourage user participation, and provide stronger network security than any private system that has a single point of failure.

This actually looks really interesting and forward-thinking.

Cuban is also noteworthy for his involvement with Shark Tank, which is a highly addictive show if you’ve watched it. Cuban and his fellow “sharks” are at times ruthless to aspiring entrepreneurs. Nevertheless, they help launch people to success.

It’ll be interesting to see if Mark Cuban is testing the waters or simply teasing the American public with this exclamation to run for president. Time will tell.

Our fourth guest for “Outsiders on the Inside” is Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas’ First Congressional District. Although he has served in the House of Representatives for over a decade, Rep. Gohmert has proven to be a foe of the establishment. We discussed the Las Vegas shooting/pushes for gun control, the SAVES Act, and what’s challenging about being an outsider here in the nation’s capital.

This morning in Kentucky, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt declared “the war on coal is over” when unveiling a new Trump administration move to revoke the Obama-era Clean Power Plan.

Pruitt said no governmental agency “should ever use its authority” to “declare war on any sector of our economy.”

The EPA administrator’s announcement in Hazard, Kentucky, has a lot of symbolism: Whayne Supply, a company that sells coal mining supplies, was forced to lay off about 60 percent of its workers in years’ prior.

A review of the Clean Power Plan was announced back in April. The Clean Power Plan of 2015 promised to cut U.S. carbon dioxide emissions to 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. This was considered former President Obama’s hallmark environmental law. Now it is being dismantled for its apparent overreach and deliberate intention to kill the oil and gas industries in favor of more costly renewable energy sources.

The 2015 Clean Power Plan was unveiled as a 460-page rule titled “Carbon Pollution Emission Guidelines for Existing Stationary Sources: Electric Utility Generating Units.” This alone should make one skeptical of this very plan.

The League of Conservation Voters signaled their support for the hallmark plan, praising it for establishing “the first national limits on carbon pollution from existing power plants—our nation’s single largest source of the pollution fueling climate change.”

Under Pruitt’s tenure at the EPA, the Trump administration announced its intention in June to withdraw from the Paris agreement–which signaled a good move by our nation. Pruitt has also won praise from Denver Post for his prompt response to compensate the victims of the Gold King Mine spill of 2015–which his predecessor neglected to address.

Pruitt is arguably one of Trump’s best hires to date. Despite members of the media and green mafia maligning him, he’s off to a good start in cleaning up the EPA.